and aiming sub-machine-guns leapt from the trees right in front of them. ‘Don’t move! Don’t move!’ they shouted. At the same time the injured couple sprang to their feet holding pistols they had concealed under their stomachs. The woman was a man in disguise. Three more hooded men charged from the trees the opposite side of the track to close the trap.
Hank jerked around to face them. A shot of adrenaline rushed through him as the screaming ambushers closed in aggressively. His overriding personal directive to be proactive took charge and he went for it, his hand jerking under his jacket towards his holster, but a burst of machine-gun fire ripping up the ground at his feet froze him, the loudness and impact a warning of the sheer destructive power of a bullet.
‘Move and you’re focken dead! I’ll focken kill you, you bastard!’ the man who fired yelled. Hank put all further thought of movement out of his head.There was something chillingly real about this.
‘On your knees! On your knees!’ Another shouted, prodding Clemens with his gun barrel. They were talking with Irish accents.
‘On your knees!’ one of them yelled with finality and levelled his gun at Hank’s head.
Hank and Clemens lowered themselves on to their knees where they were then harshly pushed to the ground, their backs knelt on, and weapons jammed into their heads. Hank was unprepared for the level of brutality. A hand grabbed the hair on the back of his head and rammed his face into the dirt.
‘You fockers are dead,’ one of the men standing between Hank and Clemens growled. He placed his foot on Hank’s back and put his weight on it. ‘You hear me, Yanky? Your focken goose is cooked.’
The wet soil chilled Hank’s face. It was an effort to breathe with the weight of the boot on his back. The attackers then became silent and motionless, as if they were robots at the end of their current program and waiting for their next command. Hank heard someone step from the bushes and trudge through the grass to stop close by his head.
‘Let ’em up,’ said a man. Hank thought he recognised Stratton’s voice. The boot and hand lifted off him and he could take a full breath.
Hank got to his feet wiping his face and spitting dirt from his mouth. He glanced at Stratton, then at the others, who kept their balaclavas on. Clemens got to his feet, looking annoyed but kept his glaring eyes aimed at the ground.
Stratton nodded to the ambushers and they stepped back and cleared their weapons.
‘Hank,’ Stratton said, as if nothing of any consequence had happened. ‘Your turn to drive. Continue the route. Get going.’
As Hank walked around to the driver’s door his jaw throbbed and he wondered if he’d cracked it. He climbed into the car and moved his mouth from side to side. If it wasn’t it was badly bruised, but he could live with it. He wouldn’t show these guys he was in any pain if he could help it.
‘On you go, Clemens,’ Stratton said.
Clemens gritted his teeth, ignored the dirt stuck to his face and walked around to the passenger side. He climbed in and slammed the door. Hank started the engine and drove slowly away from the scene. He adjusted the rear-view mirror and watched Stratton talking with the ambushers.
Clemens wiped the dirt from his face and spat some out of his mouth.
‘Who were those guys?’ Hank asked.
‘SAS fucks,’ Clemens said angrily.
‘I guess we were meant to ignore the accident and drive on through.’
‘Hindsight’s a beautiful thing,’ Clemens said curtly. ‘Act like poxy internal security officers is what he said.That’s what we were supposed to be, right? So you don’t drive past a bleeding traffic accident with people lying half-dead in the bleeding road, do you? A load of bollocks, that’s what it is!’
‘What were we supposed to get from all that?’
‘Fucked if I know,’ Clemens said.
Clemens sat back and stewed in his anger, staring down at his feet like a kid who wasn’t going to play any more. Hank decided to leave Clemens to himself. If something else happened on this little adventure it would be in Hank’s hands anyway. He assumed that was why Stratton told him to drive.
The track curved gently to the left along the wood. Hank checked the mirror and caught a last glimpse of Stratton walking away from the SAS ambushers until the wood blocked any further view.
Hank concentrated on the road ahead. They arrived at a junction and he stopped the car. Clemens still looked too irritated to get involved, so Hank reached down beside his feet and picked up the map. After comparing it to the surroundings he took the right turn.
Hank felt surprisingly relaxed as he drove, not as nervous as he was at the start, as if being thrown to the ground and stomped on had cleared the tubes a little.
The track turned the corner of a wood and crested a slight rise. As they headed down the other side a small town appeared in front of them. It looked strangely out of place, as if a large square had been neatly carved out of the centre of a city - streets, buildings, the lot - airlifted, and then deposited in the middle of the countryside. The sight was enough to make Clemens snap out of his gloom and sit up and stare at it. It was surreal. There was no sign of life in the town. It was grey and characterless, a dense urban block in the middle of open countryside, unloved or cared for.
‘Toy town,’ Clemens said. ‘I didn’t know they had one here.’
‘What’s a toy town?’ asked Hank.
‘It’s usually used for troop training - a city environment. Purpose built. There’s a huge one in Thetford the army uses before going over the water. They put on riots and snipers, stuff like that . . . The regular army doesn’t come in here so this is obviously for SF only. You’d better slow a little.’
Hank slowed to a crawl as they approached the edge of the town and the first few buildings. The dirt track turned into tarmac and widened to the width of the main street that ran down through the centre of the collection of concrete and brick structures on either side. Clemens was back to full alert now. He pulled out his gun and checked it.
‘We can expect to come under fire,’ he said. ‘Look out for pop-up targets in windows and doorways. If we do, stop the car, get out, find cover, and then we’ll cover each other to a safe location. Watch out for friendly targets, woman carrying babies, stuff like that.’
Two-storey houses lined both sides of the street, interspersed with the occasional local shop. It reminded Hank of an ugly version of Disneyland in so far as everything one expected to find in a town was there but superficially. There were signposts, a phone booth, lampposts, dustbins and a bus stop. The street and pavements were littered with bricks, chunks of concrete and broken bottles. Several cars were parked sporadically along both sides of the road, all wrecks, and many burned out and without wheels. It looked as if a serious riot had recently taken place.
‘Your gun cocked and loaded?’ Clemens asked.
‘Yep,’ Hank replied, his hands tense on the wheel. He steered carefully along the main street, nice and easy, eyes everywhere, avoiding the larger lumps of rock and concrete. It all felt so confined. The street seemed narrow even for English towns and the houses appeared to be closer at the tops as if they leaned in over the street. An attack could come from just about anywhere.There were dozens of doorways and windows, most of them broken or missing altogether.
Fifty yards into the town a bottle floated through the sky as if out of nowhere and smashed on the street beside the car. Hank maintained the steady speed. Seconds later another bottle smashed close by followed by several more.They flew from the buildings either side of the car as it passed. One hit the car and Hank speeded up. Bricks and lumps of concrete then joined the bottles. Hank drove faster as they headed towards a collection of wrecked cars arranged like a chicane, forcing him to swerve in between them.
Several men appeared, running from the houses, and pelted the car with stones and pieces of wood. A couple ran up and whacked it with sticks and kicked it. Hank drove as fast as he could, threading the obstacles in the narrow street without hitting them. A Molotov cocktail struck the road beside the car and flames splashed against its side. More rioters appeared up ahead.There must have been thirty or forty, shouting and yelling and hurling missiles.
As Hank screeched out of the chicane he put his foot fully down. The flames bubbled the paint on the car before they extinguished. Then several yards ahead Hank saw a woman running down the pavement pushing a pram. She looked panicky, as if trying to escape the riot herself. The final obstacle was two cars parked either side
